Someone PLEASE procure me a striking, modern, big-city apartment with lots of windows, where I can hold a glass of expensive wine and gaze unseeing over the skyline at night, because apparently I’m going to feel melancholy for the rest of my life over never again being able to read this for the first time and if I’m going to do so I at least want to be glamorous about it.

https://emmareadstoomuch.wordpress.com/2020/03/14/my-favorite-books-of-the-whole-year-only-3-months-late/

Or, at the very least, I need to locate the sort of old-fashioned library described in 1920s mystery novels with a bar cart stocked with aged scotch and shelves filled with leather-bound tomes, except their antique spines will be a façade for the kinds of things I actually enjoy reading, rather than being 800 different copies of the Bible or whatever, and I will never drink the scotch because everything about the process of drinking scotch is like the scotch is asking you not to drink it. (Scotch is the poison-dart frog of beverages.)

Basically what I’m saying here is - Ever since I read the last page of this book three months ago, I have felt a small, unrelenting sadness, which I believe will only be solved by one of the following methods:
a) I dedicate my life to tracking down a door to the Starless Sea, and either I find one or it turns out the real reward was the friends I made along the way;
b) I experience repeated memory loss, allowing myself to read this book over and over again for the first time, re-beginning every time I finish it;
or c) I live the rest of my days in homage to this story.

All options will require funds that I will never have (I’m an English major, after all), so please kindly Venmo me at your convenience. Thanks.

This is the most gorgeous ode to stories and literature. It’s a thank-you gift to anyone who has ever been a Reader, with a capital R - not just someone who reads but someone WHO READS, as an identity, as a life-force, as a passion, as the meaning of life.

I dare any true bookworm to read this book with an open heart and a ready mind and not feel grateful that their life overlapped with its publication date.

Erin Morgenstern’s ability to create divine settings you can see and smell and lust after and yearn to experience is unparalleled.

My favorite book ever is, as anyone who has so much as made the online equivalent of eye contact me knows, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. I love it with enough passion that everything about it is my favorite of that thing: my favorite characters, my favorite prose, and, naturally, my favorite setting.

Before I read this book, my unrivaled first runner-up was the setting of the Night Circus.

Now, I think both Wonderland and the circus may have been bumped down a slot. Never has a setting known me, seen my soul, like that of the magical underground great world of stories in these pages.

Plus, I didn’t have to slog through a Night Circus-level instalove romance to get there.

This was a perfect book. Mysterious, confusing, strange, magical. Beautifully written and populated with characters you love hard and immediately. I read this so slowly because I SAVORED it. I, a compulsive speed-reader whose simultaneous highest compliment and M.O. is reading a book in a day or so, knew that my finishing this book would be a small heartbreak, and so I tried to postpone it as long as I could.

So instead, I’ll pay the highest compliment to this that any reader can pay to any story -

Bottom line: It was hard to pick up another book after reading this one.

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rereading updates

THIS IS THE BEST DAY OF MY LIFE!!!

all month long, i'll be rereading this fav as part of my book club with my lovely elle! follow on instagram here or join the discussion here.

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Yes, I teared up upon finishing my reread of this book like a starlet in an old movie. No, I don't want to talk about it. I JUST WANT THIS TO NEVER END.

a lovely little reread with lily

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pre-review

i wanted this to never ever ever end ever.

the fact that it did is my biggest complaint.

review to come / 5 stars

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currently reading updates

i hope someday i love something as much as erin morgenstern loves comma splices

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me: i need to finish my reading challenge!!!

also me: (picks up 500-page book)

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tbr review

wait.........MULTIPLE beautiful covers????

someone take mercy on me

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COVERCOVERCOVERCOVERCOVERCOVERCOVERCOVER!!!

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hello i would like to read this now please. 2019 is not going to work for me thank you